


Light Is a Particle and a Wave

by nonelvis



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:42:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonelvis/pseuds/nonelvis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The TARDIS never speaks in straight lines, but the Doctor doesn't need two points to connect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light Is a Particle and a Wave

**Author's Note:**

> Post-"Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" fic I've apparently been forgetting to post since ... uh ... May? Oops.

Time can be rewritten, at least when convenient. Timelines disappear, are reshaped, wink into existence where none have been before.

So tonight, when the Doctor reaches deep inside the TARDIS console to swap a red wire for a blue one, and there's the wasp-sting of a missing timeline – a bright flash of pain, and shadows overlaying what he already knows to be true – he's not surprised. He is a Time Lord, after all, and one of the few beings left in the universe fully capable of juggling multiple timelines in his head without going completely mental.

But this wasp-sting shimmers and shimmies inside him, and he withdraws his hand from the console with a gasp. "What ... what did they do to you, my poor girl?" he says, stroking the metal strut beside the open panel.

The TARDIS mutters at him in her own way. The Doctor's head vibrates with telepathic fragments of stories that might have been, may be yet to come, may have happened long ago. Ghosts flickering through his thoughts, layering atop one another, leaving shaggy silhouettes where they disappear: time zombies, dead before they were ever born. An uncertain agony; the Doctor and his ship locked in a quantum state of pain and not pain, cause and no cause.

The TARDIS never speaks in straight lines, but the Doctor doesn't need two points to connect. What matters is in some timeline, much less far-off than he'd like to think, his beloved ship lies in scraps, held in stasis by sheer force of her will.

And by her love for him.

The Doctor wipes his hands on a rag and goes to fetch a ladder and more cloths.

* * *

The architectural reconfiguration system glows blue in artificial dusk. Oh, it's been ages, literally, since he last cleaned in here, and look at what she's come to, his poor ship, last of her kind, coated in dust so thick he sneezes six times when he finally makes it all the way up the ladder to the apex of the tree. The computing globes hang from willowy branches, dimmer than they should be due to his neglect.

He dips a cloth into a shallow bucket of water, wrings it dry; and cradling a globe in his palm, he gently wipes it clean.

One down; so many, many more to go. But each globe he handles hums beneath his fingertips, warm and pleased at the touch.

* * *

He finishes what would probably be the next morning if he bothered to observe such niceties when on his own. Whatever time it is, it's time for a cup of tea, and he brings a china cup and a dish of toast and marmalade to eat at the foot of the tree.

Its trunk is thick and ropy: branches braided together into a sturdy central cable. It looks uncomfortable to sit against, but the cable bends slightly for him, curving gently to cup his back.

Above him, the globes glow and sparkle like the stars. And the light, the light shifts across the spectrum: from deep blue to turquoise to pale cyan to canary-tinged white and finally to apricot orange, warmth spreading across the artificial sky.

It looks like home. To both of them.

He pats the TARDIS' trunk, and sips his tea, and lingers all day beneath her branches.


End file.
